Woman’s Bra Stops Hunter’s Stray Bullet

[Photo by Tim Boyle/Getty Images]

The would-be victim of a stray bullet was spared from serious injury by an unlikely source: a woman’s bra. Earlier this week, a German woman having a day out in the countryside was on a bike ride with her husband when they decided to stop for a rest on the side of the road near an open field. While they were stopped, the woman got caught in the crossfire of a local boar hunt.

The local German newspaper, Gadebusch-Rehnaer, reported that the woman, whose name was not released, was struck by a stray bullet in the area of her chest but was saved by the underwire of her bra. The impact caused a small hematoma (a bruise), but the underwire of the woman’s bra stopped it from seriously wounding her.

The underwire of a woman’s bra runs from the side of the chest over the area of the heart and the lungs.

Local police are investigating, but it’s not the first time that there’s been a boar hunting accident. In 2008, a man was hit by a stray bullet and died, prompting tighter restrictions on the hunts. The 6.5 millimeter bullets used in such hunts are considered to be quick and deadly, and have prompted calls for the use of a smaller caliber bullet to avoid accidental injury to people.

Russia Today reported that the most recent accident in an area of Germany, called Mecklenberg-Western Pomerania, occurred in the countryside between two towns. Boar hunts in such areas are relatively common.

Germany is not the only country to have the strange distinction of a woman’s bra saving her from a bullet.

In February, 2015, a woman’s bra in Brazil was believed to have saved her from serious injury when she got caught in the crossfire of an armed robbery. Ivete Medeiros was wearing a black bra with underwire when the stray bullet struck her and made her stagger backwards, according to the Guardian.

Aside from a hole in her blouse where the bullet entered at the place of her heart, Medeiros suffered no injuries.

Her bra and the strange incident became nationally famous afterward, in a country where shootings from stray bullets and other violence are increasingly common. A Brazilian journalist was recently murdered on-air, according to the Inquisitr.

Pictures of Medeiros’s life-saving underwire with the bullet lodged in it were widely published, but she credited more than her undergarment with saving her life. She described feeling a burning sensation where the bullet lodged, but credited “divine intervention” with saving her, not her woman’s bra.